8

Asha was seized with a kind of fear. What had come to pass? Mother goes, aunt goes. Their happiness seemed to be driving everyone away --- next, perhaps, it would be her own turn to be driven. In the midst of the abandoned and emptied household, the new conjugal idyll began to feel strangely out of place to her. When love is plucked from the hard duties of the household, like a flower cut from the plant, it cannot sustain itself on its own sap alone --- it grows listless and withered by degrees.

Asha, too, began to perceive within herself that in their unbroken togetherness there was a certain exhaustion and weakness --- that their union seemed, from time to time, to droop and flag; that without the firm and capacious support of the household, it was difficult to keep it upright at all. Love, when it has no root in work, cannot fully flower or endure. Mahendra, too, in defiance of the hostile world around him, tried to light all the lamps of his love-celebration at once and bring the marriage festival to its crowning moment in the midst of the inauspicious emptiness of the house.

He gave Asha a little poke and said: "Chuni --- tell me, what has got into you lately? Masima is gone --- why do you let that weigh your spirits down? Is not the love between the two of us the very end and crown of all love?" Asha would think with distress: "Then there must be some deficiency in my love. I so often think of Masima; I feel afraid when I remember that my mother-in-law has gone." And then she would make every effort to wash away these offences against love.

The household was not going well now --- the servants had begun to take liberties. One day the maidservant did not come, pleading illness; the Brahmin cook disappeared on a drinking bout and was not to be found. Mahendra said to Asha: "Excellent --- a fine opportunity; today we shall manage the cooking ourselves." Mahendra took a carriage and went to the New Market to shop.

He had not the slightest idea of what was needed or in what quantity --- but he returned home in high spirits with a great many bundles. Asha, too, was none too clear on what to do with them. The attempt lasted until two or three in the afternoon and produced a variety of extraordinary and unpalatable inventions, with which Mahendra was vastly amused. Asha could not share his amusement; at her own ignorance and helplessness she felt inwardly a deep shame and distress. Such a disorder reigned in the house from room to room that when anything was wanted in a hurry it was all but impossible to find.

Mahendra's surgical instruments were pressed into service one day for chopping vegetables and retired thereafter into obscurity among the rubbish; his notebook of lecture notes, conscripted as a fan, went to rest on a bed of ashes in the kitchen. Amid all these unimaginable reversals of order, Mahendra's delight knew no bounds --- but Asha was growing pained. To float gaily along in the current of an undisciplined and wilful disorder, smiling as everything was swept away --- this seemed to the girl more and more like a kind of terror.

One evening the two of them had laid out a mattress on the covered terrace and were sitting together. Before them lay the open rooftop. After the rain, the skyline of Calcutta's rooftops and towers was flooded with moonlight. Asha sat with her head bent, stringing a garland from a pile of rain-wet bakul blossoms she had gathered from the garden. Mahendra was tugging at the flowers to hinder her, raising all manner of obstruction, making contrary criticisms, working to create a small quarrel for no reason at all.

The moment Asha showed any sign of scolding him for this unprovoked persecution, Mahendra would find some ingenious means of sealing her mouth, nipping the rebuke in the very bud. Just then, from a cage in the neighbouring house, a tame cuckoo began to call: koohoo, koohoo. At once, both Mahendra and Asha looked up towards their own swaying cage overhead. Their own cuckoo had never once let a neighbour's call go unanswered in silence --- why did it not reply today?

"What has happened to the bird?" said Asha, with growing anxiety.

"It has heard your voice and feels ashamed of its own," said Mahendra.

"No, please --- I am not joking," said Asha in an earnest voice.

"Look and see what has happened." Mahendra took down the cage.

He lifted the cover and saw --- the bird was dead. After Annapurna had left, the servant had taken leave, and no one had attended to the bird. Before his eyes, Asha's face grew grey and still. Her fingers would not move; the flowers fell where they lay. Though the thing struck Mahendra too, he tried to laugh it off for fear of losing the evening's mood too soon.

"No great loss," he said; "I would have gone off to practice medicine, and that bird would have tormented you with its calling." As he spoke, he drew his arm around Asha's waist and tried to pull her close.

Asha quietly freed herself, shook her sari-end clean of all the bakul flowers, and let them fall.

"What is the use?" she said.

"For shame. Go quickly and bring Ma back."